What AI sees in your selfie

PLUS: Japan heads to Martian moon

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. How much of your medical future is written on your face?

Mass General Brigham researchers trained AI on 40M+ faces to estimate biological age and cancer survival risk from a single selfie. But the next test is whether it actually improves care.

Also: Apple tees up its next big reveal, and Japan sets out to bring a piece of a Martian moon back to Earth.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • A selfie could help predict cancer survival

  • Japan is chasing a Martian mystery

  • Apple sets date for touchscreen Mac

  • Meta pops the hood on Prometheus

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MEDICAL TECH

Image source: Mass General Brigham

The Rundown: A selfie could become oncology’s next medical clue: Mass General Brigham researchers just developed AI tools that estimate biological age and cancer survival risk from a single face photo.

The details:

  • Trained on more than 40M facial images, FAHR-Face powers separate models for estimating biological age and predicting survival directly.

  • In a test group of ~4K patients, 53% of those scored 0.9–1 died within 90 days. Among those scored 0–0.1, the figure was 2%.

  • Across 38K+ radiotherapy patients, looking 5+ years older than your actual age meant a 21% higher risk of death over around 4 years of follow-up.

  • The survival model focused on the area beneath the eyes and around the nose bridge; the age model emphasized facial folds, forehead, and temples.

Why it matters: Cancer treatment hinges partly on a difficult question: How much time does a patient have? A single photo could give doctors another clue, potentially helping guide how aggressively to treat. The next hurdle is proving that these predictions do more than forecast outcomes, and that they actually help improve care.

SPACE TECH

Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (Phobos)

The Rundown: Japan launched a $578M, five-year mission to bring home a piece of Phobos — Mars’ largest moon — and understand whether it is actually a captured asteroid or the wreckage of an ancient planetary collision.

The details:

  • The MMX spacecraft launched aboard Japan’s H3 rocket on Oct. 20, local time, with arrival at Mars expected in Aug. 2027 and samples due home in 2031.

  • The French-German Idefix will scout Phobos for around 100 days, navigating gravity less than one-thousandth of Earth’s to help identify a safe landing site.

  • MMX will attempt up to two landings in 2029, using a coring device and a nitrogen-powered sampler to collect at least 10g of material.

  • China aims to deliver Mars samples in 2031, while NASA is still weighing how to retrieve the specimens its Perseverance rover has collected.

Why it matters: MMX could succeed where two Soviet probes launched in 1988 and Russia’s 2011 Phobos-Grunt mission fell short. Phobos’ surface is expected to contain its own material alongside impact debris, and fragments blasted off Mars, so even 10 grams could help unravel how the planet’s moons formed.

APPLE

Image source: Apple

The Rundown: Apple is set to hold its second launch event of the month on Oct. 28 in Los Angeles — tagline “Pro and tell”, and Bloomberg reports the headliner is the first touchscreen MacBook Pro.

The details:

  • The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with OLED touchscreens and, for the first time, a Dynamic Island, are expected to run M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.

  • Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman still expects the new models to be “significantly lighter,” though recent reporting has cooled hopes for a much slimmer design.

  • A refreshed iPad mini is expected to gain an OLED display and move its front-facing camera to the landscape edge.

  • The “Pro and tell” event starts at 10 a.m. Pacific, following Apple’s October 13 smart-home launch; the product lineup remains unconfirmed.

Why it matters: Steve Jobs called vertical touchscreens “ergonomically terrible” in 2010, and Craig Federighi was still describing the iPad as “the ultimate touch device” in June 2025. The rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro would reverse 16 years of resistance while delivering the laptop’s first major redesign since 2021.

META

Image source: Meta

The Rundown: Meta said the first phase of Prometheus, its gigawatt-scale AI supercluster in Ohio, is complete. Its engineering write-up reads like a survival guide for keeping hundreds of thousands of chips working together.

The details:

  • Prometheus links hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips across regular buildings and storm-proof tents, and Meta plans to grow the number to ~1M.

  • At its worst in mid-2025, the cluster stalled at about 1K interruptions per 8K GPUs per day. Meta and Nvidia spent a year cutting that by 99%.

  • Every rack of 72 chips runs only 64 and keeps 8 in reserve, so a failed chip gets swapped instead of halting training.

  • Pausing/resuming training can swing power draw by tens of MWs in seconds, so Meta caps GPU power with software and absorbs spikes with batteries.

Why it matters: Every interruption burns computing time Meta has already paid for. Cutting those losses gives it more room to train and experiment — and those lessons now feed into Hyperion. As the clusters get bigger, the engineers keeping them running could have an increasingly powerful hand in setting the pace of the AI race.

QUICK HITS

A Google Cloud outage in London reportedly disrupted Revolut and other UK banking services, with Revolut assuring customers that their money and data are safe.

Tesla is taking Roadster deposits of up to $250,000 while warning buyers it cannot guarantee when or whether their cars will be delivered.

Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for ~$5.7B, including debt, adding a marketing platform built for personalized, AI-driven customer outreach, the WSJ reports.

Olo is taking on DoorDash and Uber Eats with a U.S. ordering app that promises no menu markups, charging customers a 5% service fee plus delivery costs.

Vinted, a secondhand clothing app, is tightening checks and removing listings suspected of selling goods looted during France’s riots this weekend.

Mark Wahlberg plans to open a Municipal Gym near Las Vegas this Dec., pitching fitness, diagnostics, and recovery services as an affordable option to longevity clubs.

New research casts doubt on whether social media bans improve young people’s mental health, highlighting instead the need for safer platforms and digital literacy.

Colossal Biosciences, which aims to revive the extinct moa, acquired a rare moa egg and plans to return it to New Zealand.

Yelp’s new “Check for Me” AI feature calls restaurants to check wait times for your party and texts you the results.

Unauthorized drones are temporarily banned within 1 nautical mile of the U.S.-Mexico border, up to 400 feet, to counter cartel smuggling and surveillance.

Netflix is reportedly shaking up its creative leadership and chasing bigger hits as U.S. viewing slips and YouTube and TikTok gain ground.

That's it for today's tech rundown!

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Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — The Rundown’s editorial team

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